The Long-Range War

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Order the missiles taken out as soon as possible,” she ordered. She was jumpy, but the enemy had shown a disconcerting degree of imagination. Who knew what else they might come up with? “The minelayers?”

  “Being engaged,” Yolanda said. “The enemy isn’t giving us the time to replenish the minefields.”

  Which isn't really a surprise, Hoshiko told herself, tiredly. They’ve already expended a great deal of energy in clearing it.

  She watched the missiles die, one by one. They were antimatter-tipped, the deadly payloads detonating as their containment fields failed, but there was nothing particularly special about them. They wouldn't have done real damage even if they’d been allowed to strike the protective shields. The enemy would need to fire a great many more missiles to make a real impact.

  It struck her suddenly. She smiled, shaking her head in disbelief. The Tokomak didn't think the fortresses were real! Of course they didn’t. They hadn’t bothered to develop any concept of prefabricated fortresses, let alone dragging the components along and assembling them on the spot in record time. The enemy CO might simply have assumed that the fortresses were ECM buoys, configured to look like fortresses. He’d fired the missiles to test the theory. And he’d learnt that at least some of the fortresses were real.

  We should have layered deception decoys everywhere, Hoshiko thought. The Tokomak wouldn't have believed that the human race could have assembled hundreds of fortresses, ringing the gravity point in an impregnable sphere, but they wouldn't know which fortresses were real either. That would have wasted a lot of their missiles.

  She grinned at the thought, then sobered as she looked at the display. The enemy ships were still dying, but her automated platforms were nearly gone and the minefields were a distant memory. A handful of enemy freighters materialised and began a charge towards the nearest fortress, only to explode with terrifying force when they were hit. There was no way the enemy was going to get a suicidal freighter, crammed with antimatter, close to a fortress, but the sheer size of the blasts was bad enough. Her sensors and communications networks were taking a beating. If the designers hadn’t put so much redundancy into the datanets, it was quite likely that a few of them would have collapsed by now.

  They’re slowly pushing us back, she thought. And there’s nothing we can do about it yet.

  She contemplated her options as the never-ending flood of starships seemed to pause. The human fleet was holding back, but she could take her ships forward and engage the attackers directly. That would make it harder for the enemy to repeat some of their tricks, although it would also give the bastards a chance to hit her ships with a suicide freighter. Or she could just rely on the fortresses to handle the enemy ships. They’d been designed to seal off the gravity point, even if they had to take a beating in the process. She wondered, absently, if the Tokomak realised that the Solar Union had based its fortresses on their designs. There weren't that many improvements. They’d done a very good job.

  “Admiral,” Yolanda said. “An enemy ship just made it into FTL.”

  Hoshiko looked up, sharply. “It made it?”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Yolanda said. She nodded to a blinking light on the display. “She’s already well past interception range.”

  “Interesting,” Hoshiko mused. Going into FTL so close to a gravity point was dangerous. It wasn’t something she would have expected from the Tokomak, although it was quite likely that the ship was crewed by one of their servant races. And yet ... where was it going? The nearest enemy naval base was seventy light years away. “Keep an eye on her.”

  “She’ll be outside sensor range in sixty minutes,” Yolanda warned. “We’ll lose track of her then.”

  “Understood,” Hoshiko said. Another wave of enemy ships appeared on the display, spitting missiles in all directions. This time, they survived long enough to start enfolding the gravity point. “We’ll worry about her later. Concentrate on the main threat.”

  She leaned back in her chair, taking a breath as more and more enemy ships flickered into existence. The attack seemed to be slowing down, as if the Tokomak had finally gotten sick of throwing so many of their servants into the fire. They were staggering the transits now, sending the ships in groups of three rather than twelve. It improved their odds of survival considerably, at least until they reached their destination. Their datanets barely had time to come up before human missiles started screeching in for the kill.

  Maybe the bastards are getting sick of the slaughter, she thought, although she didn’t really believe it. Her forces might have killed hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of servants, but it was a mere drop in the ocean. The Tokomak had trillions of servants from nearly a hundred different races. Everyone she’d killed was nothing more than a rounding error. Or maybe they’re planning something really bad.

  “Order the replenishment crews to start pushing the next set of platforms forward,” she said, as space fell quiet. “We need to rebuild as fast as possible.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.

  Hoshiko nodded. She’d killed hundreds of ships - it said something about the sheer scale of the forces unleashed that no one had an accurate count of how many enemy ships had been blown to atoms - but she knew she’d barely scratched the enemy fleet. If they were holding back, they were planning something. And that meant ... what? She wanted to think they might be dealing with a mutiny, but she doubted it. She knew enough about how the Galactics kept their servants under control to suspect that mutiny simply wasn’t possible.

  And yet, they built a towering interstellar civilisation, she thought. Slave societies on Earth had invariably stagnated and collapsed. The Tokomak had stagnated, to some extent, but they hadn’t collapsed. Instead, they were facing a major war that could inspire their servants to rise up in revolt. Will they be able to keep their empire together long enough to beat us?

  A new wave of red icons appeared on the display, followed by two more. The enemy warships slid away from the gravity point, firing their missiles in all directions. A stream of smaller targets followed, launching away from the warships and heading out into space. Gunboats, Hoshiko realised. The enemy had turned their smaller warships into makeshift carriers. It was proof, she supposed, that the gunboats couldn’t transit on their own. They were too small to carry a Tokomak-designed jump drive.

  They’ll have to slim the drive down, she thought. Or cut out everything else, including life support, to give the gunboat the ability to jump.

  Yolanda sucked in her breath as a larger red icon materialised. “Admiral ...”

  “I saw,” Hoshiko said, as the enemy battleship belched its first salvo of missiles. She’d been wrong. The Tokomak offensive had entered the next stage. “The big boys have arrived.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Commodore Yu paced his command deck, trying not to let the worry show on his face as the second enemy battleship materialised beside the first. They were already moving away from the gravity point, clearing the way for two more to follow in quick succession. The contemplative part of his mind admired the sheer nerve of the enemy officers in cutting the transit time down to a minimum; the more practical side of his mind cursed how rapidly the enemy firepower was multiplying. Their battleships were already launching massive salvos towards the fortresses.

  “Contact all fortresses,” he ordered. He didn’t have to consult with Admiral Stuart. They’d already planned the battle. “They are authorised to fire at will. I say again, fire at will.”

  Fortress-One - no one had bothered to give the prefabricated fortress an actual name - barely shifted under his feet as it unleashed a massive salvo of its own. It was a far more stable launching platform than any starship, even though it was also a sitting duck. Yu was all too aware that his command could not jump into FTL if it was facing destruction, something the enemy would know too. The fortress’s only real advantage was that the mass saved on starship drives had been spent on weapons, ammunition storage chambers and
shield generators. It would take one hell of a beating to knock his fortress’s shields down and, even then, the hull was incredibly tough. Fortress-One was designed to keep fighting even as she was battered into rubble.

  The enemy missiles roared towards his point defence envelope. He watched them on the display, silently noting the text boxes that warned of missile improvements and a dozen different factors that proved they were facing the Tokomak, rather than their servants. Yu thought he would have spotted it even without the reports from the analysts. The missiles seemed to have a command network an order of magnitude more capable than anything else they’d seen so far. And they’d targeted his fortress.

  His eyes narrowed. Did the enemy know they’d targeted the command fortress? Or was it merely a coincidence? There was no visible difference between Fortress-One and the remainder of the fortresses, nothing to suggest that it might be special. The command network consisted of tight-beam lasers ... and, even if the enemy had managed to read the messages, they were repeated so often that it would be hard to tell where they’d actually originated. Hell, Yu knew his subordinates on the other fortresses would take command if Yu was killed or put out of contact. The enemy wouldn’t gain anything if they took Yu out of commission.

  Apart from a destroyed fortress, he thought, wryly. That will give them an edge, even if Captain Hastert takes command at once.

  He frowned as the enemy missiles entered his engagement envelope. They weren't as sneaky as their human counterparts - and some of them were following a ballistic trajectory, making them easy prey - but they had some advantages of their own. A couple exploded with terrifying force when they were taken out, proving that they were antimatter-tipped; their deaths took out several of their comrades, threatening to trigger a chain reaction that would wipe out the remainder of the salvo. But the remainder just kept coming.

  “Two of the enemy battleships have been destroyed,” his tactical officer reported. “But they’re still coming.”

  Yu nodded, stiffly. “Then we’ll keep destroying them,” he said. “They have to run out of missiles at some point, don’t they?”

  He frowned as a trio of freighters appeared on the gravity point. Were they loaded with antimatter? They couldn’t be loaded with antimatter. The enemy battleships were sitting on the gravity point, firing in all directions. An antimatter explosion now would be a colossal own goal. The Tokomak might not give a damn about their servants, to the point where they were prepared to send them to their deaths in their millions, but surely they’d be a little more worried about their own people. And then the display blossomed with red icons.

  “Gunboats,” the tactical officer said. “Hundreds of gunboats.”

  “I see,” Yu said. Gunboats were rare in fleet engagements - they were too small to defend themselves and too large to evade - but he could see some uses for the little craft. They could enhance the enemy point defence, if they wished, or harass the fortresses. He hoped they’d chose the latter. They’d be irritating, but they’d also be easy to kill. “Target them when they enter engagement range.”

  The steady flood of battleships showed no sign of letting up, even though the fortresses had more than enough combined firepower to keep them pinned on the gravity point. They belched wave after wave of missiles towards the fortresses, some of which inevitably got through the point defence and slammed home. Yu kept his face immobile as the damage reports steadily got grimmer and grimmer, although - so far - his damage control teams seemed to be keeping it under control. The real danger lay in simply shooting his magazines dry. He had thousands of missiles in each of his fortresses, but the enemy fleet was soaking them up with terrifying speed. It was easy to believe that he’d kill one enemy ship with each of his missiles, then watch helplessly as yet another enemy ship advanced on his position after he’d fired his last missile.

  He gritted his teeth as his fortress shuddered under yet another impact. The aliens just kept coming, trampling on their own dead to get at him. He’d considered the defences impregnable, when he’d helped design them. They’d all considered the defences impregnable. It had been easy to understand why the wars had gone on for so long, before the Tokomak had invented FTL. Getting through a gravity point was incredibly costly. It was more surprising that the first Galactics hadn’t realised they couldn't kill each other and decided to come to terms centuries before the Tokomak had turned the universe upside down.

  “Sir, they’re concentrating their fire on our forward shields,” the tactical officer said, urgently. “They’re trying to punch through the shield hexagon.”

  “Rotate the inner shields to compensate” Yu ordered. “And then bring up the reserve shield generators.”

  And hope we can stand up to the battering long enough to win, he added, silently. Another battleship made transit through the gravity point, a handful of destroyers following through on her tail. This could get really bad.

  ***

  “The enemy fortresses are all real,” the aide said. He sounded astonished as he accessed the latest reports. “Your Excellency ...”

  “I can see that,” Neola said, keeping one eye on the timer. The enemy had done a remarkable job of preparing their defences, even though they’d faced severe limitations. She had to admit she was tempted to keep some humans around, if she could ensure they were kept under proper control. Their skills could be put to good use as she brought the known galaxy back under Tokomak rule. “Continue funnelling battleships through the gravity point.”

  She watched, coolly, as yet another battleship entered the gravity point and vanished. The battleships were far less expendable than the smaller ships, but they had to be risked at some point. She would have preferred to send in the superdreadnaughts, yet she simply didn’t have enough of them to risk heavy losses. There were too many factions, even amongst the Galactics, who’d turn on the Tokomak if they thought their masters looked weak.

  And we’re not going to win the war simply by winning this battle, she thought, as she checked the reports. We’re still going to have to push on to Earth.

  Another report popped up in front of her. An enemy fortress had been destroyed. It looked to have been a lucky hit, a brief shield failure when one of her missiles had been in the perfect place to take advantage of it, but it had hurt the enemy. They’d be shocked to realise just how much of their firepower they’d just lost. Indeed, they'd have to bring their fleet forward to compensate for the disaster ...

  And that, she told herself, would be playing right into her hands.

  ***

  “Fortress-Seventeen has been destroyed,” Yolanda reported. “The crew had no time to reach the escape pods.”

  Hoshiko cursed. “Hoskins? What happened?”

  “As near as we can tell,” the analyst said over the intercom, “the enemy got lucky. Their missile went off too close to the fortress’s missile elevators, destroying the warhead containment chambers. And the antimatter went boom.”

  “Shit,” Hoshiko said. The fortresses were tough, but there were limits. No one could really prepare for an antimatter explosion inside a fortress. “If the enemy got lucky ...”

  “They may try to do it deliberately next time,” Hoskins warned. “And we have to move missiles from the magazines to the tubes.”

  Commodore Yu can worry about that, Hoshiko thought. It was his job. She wouldn’t peer over his shoulder without very good reason. We have other problems.

  She studied the display, keeping her face under tight control. A cluster of red icons was sitting on top of the gravity point, just far enough from the gravitational nexus to be fairly sure they weren’t going to interpenetrate with a new arrival. The Tokomak had managed to establish enough of a datanet, despite her best efforts, to ensure a degree of continuity as older ships were destroyed and newer ships arrived. Their missiles were seeking out their targets with lethal efficiency, while their gunboats were trying to shoot down human missiles that might otherwise hit the battleships. And the steady stream of wars
hips was slowly starting to grow faster. It was only a matter of time before they started to send through the superdreadnaughts.

  A blue icon flickered on the edge of the display. She glanced at it, then snorted in irritation. An interstellar convoy in FTL, one that hadn’t heard that Apsidal was closed to shipping. They were in for a surprise when they arrived at the gravity point. She wondered if they’d stick around to see who won or simply turn around and flee back into FTL. They weren’t the only freighters heading to Apsidal too. Anyone unlucky enough to be in transit when the shit hit the fan might not have heard that it had hit the fan.

  Poor bastards, she thought, although she wasn’t entirely averse to an audience. The Tokomak had already taken heavy losses, including forty battleships. Their fleet was vast, but it wouldn't suffice to keep their empire under control if everyone rose up against them in one vast wave of hatred. I wonder how many of the Galactics wish they had a chance to send observers to this fight.